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Planetside 2: Thoughts and feelings so far?

I didn't participate in the beta, played maybe 6 hours so far (4 of which were with RPS).

Couple of things:
1) Respawn is way, WAY too fast. I haven't seen the timer increasing the more you die either(which happened in PS1, iirc). This makes death essentially meaningless in a tactical sense, which kind of ruins a lot of the fun in the game for me.
2) Continents feel rather small, I also think it's a shame they got rid of the home continents idea (In PS1, each continent only had one warp gate to a faction E.G. Amerish was VS, if you were from a different faction you needed to hotdrop in and capture somewhere to spawn vehicles or else drive in from a linked warpgate from another continent, e.g. Hossin or Extinction).
3) I seriously suck. I've always been an average fps player, but in PS2 i'm definitely below average. I couldn't kill a fly
4) Graphics, sounds and atmosphere are amazing. My very first battle was a three way at night in a large base. Tracers, shockwaves, noise everywhere.
5) Even though there's three continents, only one ever seems to be particularly active?

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

Respawn rate is fine. It means you get back into the action quick which keeps the sense of mayhem and battle going. Imagine if there was a 1 minute respawn coupled with how fast you can die. You can literally spawn and die right away, so that would be two minutes of no action for you. Also, it's not like the game forces you to respawn after 10 seconds, you can take all the time you want to adjust your load out or pick a new class.

Amazing game. I haven't played the first, but dabbled in Bad Company 2 and Battlefield 3 which I loved for their atmosphere - exactly what Vicious mentioned as his 4th point. And now I see this, but in a WAY bigger scale! Fantastic.

That said... I suck! This is Battlefield all over again. These are games which I love playing but can't really enjoy until I'm able to perform at least decently, which means I will have to train quite a bit. I still feel, they could have done a better introduction for new players (though there are some rather good tutorial videos on youtube). I still have basically no clue what best to do with my certs. Some kind of ingame training scenarios would be nice where you could either test some weapons or ti practice flying.

Sure, but getting back into the action almost instantly + MMO with a strategy/tactical layer do not necessarily mix! PS1 had a much better system imho, penalised dying in a particular battle but not in general. Also, bit of a jump from 8s to 60s.

Enjoying the game so far, and purely gameplay wise, more than in beta. Some days I do decently kill ratio wise, other times I die all the time.
What I particularly love is that PvP kind of has a meaning here. It is about seizing territory, defending territory and tactics which are not constrained by map size. Also, the various ways to fight, such as mechanized infantry assaults, Galaxy hot drops or armoured column mayhem makes it more fun.

Otherwise though on the technical side, I have been disappointed. I'm still thinking partnering with ProSiebenSat will hurt SOE long-term and server-wise Miller has been very unstable at times. I'm tempted to actually become a premium member and let SOE take my money, but I think I will wait in a queue for a bit until they have proven they are fixing things. At least they are listening, although only on twitter it seems.

Never look at your K/D ratio in this game, it means nothing. You can be getting all the kills in the world, but if you're not working as a part of a team to take over bases and areas you're not helping as much as you might think. Of course, it's your game and you're free to play it how you like!

I'm loving it so far (queue bugs aside). I'm even tempted to spend real life money on it! I played a medic for most of the beta, but now I've been using the L.Assault a lot more.

Enjoyed it so far. I still have no idea what I'm doing most of the time though. Large night time engagements are a treat, tracers and explosions going off everywhere, it's just a glorious mayhem.

One of the server-crashes on Miller yesterday messed up something on my machine and I had to reboot to fix it, which I can't remember last time I had to do. I've also had the client crash on me once, when I tried to do a quick redeploy with a vehicle. So they need to work a bit on stability.

Enjoying it so far, although my PC is old and pretty much shit these days. Upgrading 2013.

The game still has some balance issues, and a ton of performance issues. But nothing that kills the fun for me. Already spent some cash on Station Cash during the 3x Deal (getting 6000SC for 17 Euro) and currrently only spent it on HA AA (ouch!). Keeping it for now as none of the customizations really look all too good, at least not on lowest details.

Enjoying it so far, although my PC is old and pretty much shit these days. Upgrading 2013.

The game still has some balance issues, and a ton of performance issues. But nothing that kills the fun for me. Already spent some cash on Station Cash during the 3x Deal (getting 6000SC for 17 Euro) and currrently only spent it on HA AA (ouch!). Keeping it for now as none of the customizations really look all too good, at least not on lowest details.

Yeah, you could sit on a wall and kill 300 enemy soldiers, but that's just bailing out the water. Meanwhile, the three guys sneaking around the back to blow up the spawn point might avoid all contact and only get one or two kills each, but if they take out the spawn point they'll singlehandedly save the base.

The respawn timer works fine, I think. It's about the bigger picture most of the time, so if you're respawning lots, that's generally a sign that something's wrong with your tactics.

I agree that it gets the chaos of war perfectly. The sense that you can make a difference, but also that the world is huge and doesn't care about you is great. It does scale with huge assaults, but also those tiny duels and skirmishes around the main battle just right. I snuck ahead of our assault the other night to scope out enemy numbers at an outpost that would cut them off if taken. Ended up stuck behind enemy lines, listening to both enemy sides fight each other in the distance, while reinforcements on buggies drove in not ten feet from my hiding place, jets occasionally shot at each other above, and broken tanks rolled past on their way to be repaired. I love the way that you can pretty much go anywhere and there's a good chance you'll run into someone, whether they see you or not.

I love the game.
So much stuff to do. And so much stuff to try.
I actually never had seen smoke beeing used before i certed it myself and now i am smoking everything. It fells so awesome. When your spawn is camped and all seems lost, i just place myself on my own ammo pack inside the spawn and just keep flinging smoke grenades outside. That has changed the tide of battles more than once so far. Or at least i like to tell that to myself.

However, there is one thing i hate. Bolt action snipers. Why are they there? I understand, that some people enjoy hiding somewhere and just collecting insta-kill headshots. And i do understand that it is quite hard to do, meaning they are possibly not OP. But i think they add nothing to the overall game. If you are non-sniper infantry you can either stay indoors or behind walls or you just die after random times from a headshot. You cannot react to them aiming at you, you cannot hide once they shoot. It is just boom-dead. In a game with as huge environments and extremely good sniping positions (think deploy to a spawn beacon or insta-action onto some tower or high building) they are extremely detrimial to the fun for everyone else (unless they are in a tank or plane all the time).
Of course, there are others who can explain my feelings way better than i can, like the people at Extra Credits http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/counter-play
You just cannot counter-play to snipers in PS2. You can only evade huge parts of the game if you do not want to die to them regularly. They are not fun.
It feels as if there design was solely a matter of 'Oh, we are a FPS, we need snipers.'

"Quantacat's name is still recognised even if he watches on with detached eyes like Peter Molyneux over a cube in 3D space, staring at it with tears in his eyes, softly whispering... Someday they'll get it." - The Conclave

I had some fun with it, with no major issues other than the server queues on Miller and a couple of odd temporary graphical errors.

The spawning seems a bit random, though, the jump straight in option usually gets me instadead, spawning me in the middle of an enemy tank rush or infantry column or just on top of a building I can't get off and several times I've found myself in the middle of nowhere with nothing happening.

I think I might stick more to being a medic, which, when I don't confuse my rifle and my heal-o-tron seems to be more useful than my shootificating skills (or lack thereof).

I obviously need to go back to this game. My experience with the beta was 'join game, don't really know what to do, find map, beam to 'battle' on map, fly in from space(fun!), don't know where to go, look at map, find capture point, dodge a tank, climb building. nothing happens up there, no indicator as to what I'm supposed to do at all. Get bored, jump off building, die, respawn. There were nearly no people there and no battle or anything highlighted to do there. I possibly was just doing all the wrong things and missing lots of HUD settings/controls or something but it sounds like you are all playing a different game :-).

The game, for me, needs some sort of intro to explain what you are supposed to be doing in the game. I had no problems picking up other recent shooters, battlefield and tribes spring to mind, as well as the original planetside but this was indecipherable to me. You guys are definitely making it sound fun, any thoughts as to what I should do to not bounce off it in the first 30 mins? Maybe I just managed to do EVERYTHING wrong :-).

I obviously need to go back to this game. My experience with the beta was 'join game, don't really know what to do, find map, beam to 'battle' on map, fly in from space(fun!), don't know where to go, look at map, find capture point, dodge a tank, climb building. nothing happens up there, no indicator as to what I'm supposed to do at all. Get bored, jump off building, die, respawn. There were nearly no people there and no battle or anything highlighted to do there. I possibly was just doing all the wrong things and missing lots of HUD settings/controls or something but it sounds like you are all playing a different game :-).

The game, for me, needs some sort of intro to explain what you are supposed to be doing in the game. I had no problems picking up other recent shooters, battlefield and tribes spring to mind, as well as the original planetside but this was indecipherable to me. You guys are definitely making it sound fun, any thoughts as to what I should do to not bounce off it in the first 30 mins? Maybe I just managed to do EVERYTHING wrong :-).

Easy option - join miller server as Vanu or NC (I believe the Vanu side to be larger?), get on Mumble, join in. You'll pick it up no problem and everyone is very friendly and will answer any questions you have.

No. That was a 3x 24hours sale some weeks ago. The 2x and 3x deals pop up every now and then. Mostly around holidays. I think there was a 2x one for black friday. Most of the times they are rather short, mostly 24 to 48 hours.
I would never, ever recommend to spent money on regular priced station cash because of these. Maybe only staton cash cards, as (most of the times) those also give 2x to 3x station cash if you redeem them during a sale (but not always)

This is planned. Not much point having a home continent with only 3 continents. The plan in the future is to have continents linked more like they were in PS1, once there are more continents to play on.